SOURCE: "The Christmas Books: 'Giving Nursery Tales a Higher Form'," in Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making, Indiana University Press, 1979. Reprint, Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1980, pp. 119-45.

[Below, Stone examines Charles Dickens' use of supernatural events in his five Christmas books, and maintains that while the Christmas stories are unsatisfactory as literature, they played an important role in the development of fantasy elements in Dickens' later novels.]

In the interval between the beginning of Martin Chuzzlewit and the completion of Dombey and Son, Dickens wrote five Christmas books: A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848).¹The Haunted Man, the last of the Christmas books, straddles the later limits of this interval. The Haunted Man was conceived and partly written in the interval, but not finished until Dombey was completed.² With the exception of The Battle of Life, which depends for its central mechanism on a straightforward analogy between life and an ancient battlefield, the Christmas books rely on fairy-tale machinery to gain their characteristic effects. But this puts the matter too restrictively. The Christmas books draw their innermost energies from fairy tales: they exploit fairytale themes, fairy-tale happenings, and fairy-tale techniques. Indeed the Christmas books are fairy tales. As Dickens himself put it, he was here taking old nursery tales and "giving them a higher form."³

The pattern that Dickens traces in each of his Christmas books—always excepting The Battle of Life—is the pattern that he followed with "Gabriel Grub" in Pickwick. The design could hardly be simpler or more direct. A protagonist who is mistaken or displays false values is forced, through a series of extraordinary events, to see his errors. This familiar, almost pedestrian given is interfused with fairy-tale elements, a commingling that shapes and transfigures every aspect of the design. Storybook signs set the mood, herald the onset of the action, and enforce the moral lessons. Magical happenings dominate the story. The crucial action takes place in a dream or vision presided over by supernatural creatures who control what goes on. The resolution occurs when the happenings of the vision—a magically telescoped survey of the protagonist's life, and a masquelike representation of the consequences of his false attitudes—force him to reassess his views. In the fashion of most fairy stories, the moral is strongly reiterated at the end.

This structure was of immense value to Dickens. It gave him a framework that provided an aesthetic justification for the legerdemain which in his earlier works, especially in his finales, had usually appeared, not as fairy-tale felicities, but as arbitrary fairy-tale wrenchings. He could now show misery and horror and yet do so in a context of joyful affirmation. He could depict evil flourishing to its ultimate flowering and still deny that flowering. He could introduce the most disparate scenes, events, and visions without losing the reader's confidence. He could manipulate time with no need to obey the ordinary laws of chronology. He could make his characters and events real when he wished them real, magical when he wished them magical. He could effect overnight conversions which could be justified aesthetically. He could teach by parable rather than exhortation. And he could deal with life in terms of a storybook logic that underscored both the real and the ideal.

These potentialities, fundamental ingredients in Dickens' mature narrative method (but there thoroughly assimilated to the dominant realism), are exploited with varying degrees of success in all the Christmas books. In A Christmas Carol, to take the first of the Christmas books, Dickens adapts fairy-tale effects and fairy-tale techniques with marvelous skill. All readers are aware of the ghosts and spirits that manipulate the story, but these supernatural beings are only the most obvious signs of a pervasive indebtedness to fairy stories. Dickens himself emphasized that indebtedness. He subtitled his novelette A Ghost Story of Christmas, and he followed this spectral overture with other magical associations, In the preface to the Carol he told potential readers that he had endeavored "in this ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea." Then he went on: "May it haunt their houses pleasantly and no one wish to lay it!"⁴ The chapter headings continue this emphasis. Four of the five headings reinforce supernatural expectations: "Marley's Ghost," "The First of the Three Spirits," "The Second of the Three Spirits," and "The Last of the Spirits." With such signposts at the outset, we can expect the journey itself to be full of wondrous events. We are not disappointed, though the opening begins disarmingly enough. It insists on the deadness of Marley and then drifts into a long, facetious reference to the ghost of Hamlet's father. The narrator's attitude is worldly and commonsensical, but Marley's deadness and the ghost of Hamlet's father set the scene for the wild events that are about to take place.

Scrooge sets the scene too. He has much of the archetypal miser in him, but he is more of an ordinary man than his immediate prototypes, prototypes such as Gabriel Grub, Arthur Gride, Ralph Nickleby, and Jonas Chuzzlewit. Yet at the same time Scrooge is compassed round with supernatural attributes that cunningly suffuse his fundamental realism. One soon sees how this process works. The freezing cold that pervades his inner being frosts all his external features and outward mannerisms (nipped and pointed nose, shrivelled cheek, stiffened gait, red eyes, blue lips, grating voice), and this glacial iciness chills all the world without. "He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas. . . . No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him."⁵ In this respect Scrooge is a prototype of Mr. Dombey. That cold gentleman freezes and congeals his small universe with haughty frostiness.

The story proper of A Christmas Carol begins with the traditional "Once upon a time."⁶ After this evocative opening Dickens quickly intensifies the storybook atmosphere. Scrooge lives in Marley's old chambers, and Marley died seven years ago on Christmas Eve, that is, seven years ago on the night the story opens. It is a foggy night. Nearby houses dwindle mysteriously into "mere phantoms"; ghostly forms loom dimly in the hazy mist.⁷ Out of such details, out of cold, fog, and frost, and out of brief touches of contrasting warmth, Dickens builds an atmosphere dense with personification, animism, anthropomorphism, and the like. The inanimate world is alive and active; every structure, every object plays its percipient role in the unfolding drama. Buildings and gateways, bedposts and door knockers become sentient beings that conspire in a universal morality. Everything is connected by magical means to everything else. Scrooge's chambers are a case in point. The narrator tells us that they are in a lonely, isolated building that must have played hide-and-seek with other houses in its youth, run into a yard where it had no business to be, forgotten its way out again, and remained there ever since.⁸ This lost, isolated, cutoff building, fit residence for a lost, isolated, cutoff man, has its own special weather and tutelary spirit. The fog and frost hang so heavy about the black old gateway of this building "that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold."⁹

Given a universe so magical and responsive, we are hardly surprised when Scrooge momentarily sees Marley's face glowing faintly in his front-door knocker, its "ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead."¹⁰ When Scrooge sees an equally ghostly hearse on his staircase a few moments later, we know that he is in for a night of it. Thus we are fully prepared for Marley's ghost when it does appear, and we know how to interpret its every movement and accoutrement. Marley's ghost is a superb compound of social symbolism, wild imagination, realistic detail, and grisly humor. It moves in its own strange atmosphere, its hair and clothes stirring curiously, as though agitated by "the hot vapour from an oven"; it wears a bandage round its head, and when it removes this death cloth, its lower jaw drops down upon its breast.¹¹ Like Blake's city-pent Londoner, Marley's ghost drags and clanks its "mind-forg'd manacles," the chain it "forged in life" and girded on of its "own free will"; like the ghost of Hamlet's father, it is doomed to walk the night and wander restlessly abroad.¹² Scrooge is skeptical of this apparition, but he is no match for the ghost's supernatural power. Like the Ancient Mariner with the wedding guest, the ghost "hath his will." When Scrooge offers his last resistance, the ghost raises a frightful cry, shakes its chains appallingly, and takes the bandage from round its head. Scrooge falls on his knees and submits. Like the wedding guest, now Scrooge "cannot choose but hear." And as in the Ancient Mariner, where the wedding guest's struggle and reluctant submission help us suspend our disbelief, in A Christmas Carol Scrooge's struggle and submission help us to a like suspension. The ghost has accomplished its mission; the work of the three spirits, work that will culminate in Scrooge's redemption (and our enlightenment), can now begin.

The three spirits or ghosts (Dickens uses the terms interchangeably) are allegorical figures as well as supernatural agents. The Ghost of Christmas Past combines in his person and in his actions distance and closeness, childhood and age, forgetfulness and memory; in a similar fashion the Ghost of Christmas Present is a figure of ease, plenty, and joy—an embodiment of the meaning of Christmas; the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, on the other hand, a hooded and shrouded Death, bears implacable witness to the fatal course Scrooge has been pursuing. Each spirit, in other words, enacts a role and presides over scenes that befit its representation. But it is the scenes rather than the spirits that are all-important. The scenes embody Dickens' message in swift vignettes and unforgettable paradigms—Fezziwig's ball, the Cratchits' Christmas dinner, Scrooge's lonely grave. By means of the fairy-tale machinery Dickens can move instantaneously from magic-lantern picture to magic-lantern picture, juxtaposing, contrasting, commenting, and counterpointing, and he can do all this with absolute freedom and ease. He can evoke the crucial image, limn the archetypal scene, concentrate on the traumatic spot of time, with no need to sketch the valleys in between. Like Le Sage much earlier in The Devil upon Two Sticks (a boyhood favorite of Dickens), he can fly over the unsuspecting city, lift its imperturbable rooftops, and reveal swift tableaus of pathos and passion; like Joyce much later in the opening pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he can race through the years, linger here and there, and provide brief glimpses of the unregarded moments that move and shape us. The overall effect, however, is more like that of a richly colored Japanese screen. Amid swirling mists and dense clouds one glimpses prototypical scenes of serenity and turmoil, joy and nightmare horror.

Through Scrooge Dickens attempts to embody symbolic, social, psychological, and mythic truth. Scrooge is an outrageous miser and ogre, but he is also an emblem of more ordinary pathology: he is an epitome of all selfish and self-regarding men. In his latter aspect, he touches our lives. He allows us to see how self-interest—an impulse that motivates each one of us—can swell to monster proportions. He shows us how not to live, and then, at the end, he points us toward salvation. That lesson has social as well as symbolic ramifications. We are made to see that in grinding Bob Cratchit Scrooge grinds himself, that in letting Tiny Tim perish he perishes alive himself. All society is connected: individual actions are not self-contained and personal, they have social consequences; social evils are not limited and discrete, they taint the whole society. These ideas, of course, were not unique to Dickens. They were being preached by many Victorians, by two such different men—both friends of Dickens—as Douglas Jerrold and Thomas Carlyle, for example. But Dickens presents these ideas in a more seductive guise than any of his contemporaries. And he blends teaching with much else.

For one thing, he merges symbolic paradigms and social doctrines with psychological analysis. By means of a few swift childhood vignettes he gives us some notion of why Scrooge became what he is. The first spirit shows Scrooge an image of his early self: "a solitary child, neglected by his friends," and left alone in school at Christmas time.¹³ This scene of loneliness and neglect is mitigated by a single relief: the boy's intense reading. The reading is not simply referred to, it comes to life, a bright pageant of color and warmth in his drab isolation. The exotic characters from that reading troop into the barren room and enact their familiar adventures. Scenes from The Arabian Nights flash before Scrooge, then images from Valentine and Orson, then vignettes from The Arabian Nights again, then episodes from Robinson Crusoe—all as of yore, all wonderfully thrilling and absorbing. Scrooge is beside himself with excitement. The long-forgotten memory of his lonely self and of his succoring reading softens him: he remembers what it was to be a child; he wishes that he had given something to the boy who sang a Christmas carol at his door the night before.¹⁴ A moment later Scrooge is looking at a somewhat older image of his former self, again alone in a school, again left behind at Christmas time. But now his sister Fan enters and tells him that he can come home at last, that father is kinder now and will permit him to return, that Scrooge is to be a man and "never to come back here" again.¹⁵ These memories also soften Scrooge.

The memories, of course, are versions of Dickens' own experiences: the lonely boy "reading as if for life," and saved by that reading; the abandoned child, left in Chatham to finish the Christmas term, while the family goes off to London; the banished son (banished while Fanny remains free), exiled by his father to the blacking warehouse and then released by him at last. These wounding experiences, or rather the Carol version of them, help turn Scrooge (and here he is very different from the outward Dickens) into a lonely, isolated man intent on insulating himself from harm or hurt. In a subsequent vignette, a vignette between him and his fiancée, Scrooge chooses money over love. He is the victim of his earlier wound. He seeks through power and aggrandizement to gird himself against the vulnerability that had scarred his childhood. But in making himself invulnerable, he shuts out humanity as well. This happens to Scrooge because, paradoxically, in trying to triumph over his past, he has forgotten it; he has forgotten what it is to be a child, he has forgotten what it is to be lonely and friendless, to cry, laugh, imagine, yearn, and love. The first spirit, through memory, helps Scrooge recover his past, helps him recover the humanness (the responsiveness and fellow feeling) and the imagination (the reading and the visions) that were his birthright, that are every man's birthright.

All this, and much more, is done swiftly and economically with the aid of Dickens' fairy-tale format. The rapid shifts from scene to scene, the spirits' pointed questions and answers, the telescoping, blurring, and juxtaposition of time, the fusion of allegory, realism, psychology, and fancy—all are made possible, all are brought into order and believability, by Dickens' storybook atmosphere and storybook devices. A Christmas Carol has a greater unity of effect, a greater concentration of thematic purpose, a greater economy of means towards ends, and a greater sense of integration and cohesiveness than any previous work by Dickens.

A Christmas Carol is the finest of the Christmas books. This preeminence results from its consummate melding of the most archetypal losses, fears, and yearnings with the most lucid embodiment of such elements in characters and actions. No other Christmas book displays this perfect coming together of concept and vehicle. The result is a most powerful, almost mythic statement of widely held truths and aspirations. Scrooge represents every man who has hardened his heart, lost his ability to feel, separated himself from his fellow men, or sacrificed his life to ego, power, or accumulation. The symbolic force of Scrooge's conversion is allied to the relief we feel (since we are all Scrooges, in part) in knowing that we too can change and be reborn. This is why we are moved by the reborn Scrooge's childlike exultation in his prosaic physical surroundings, by his glee at still having time to give and share. We too can exult in "Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells"; we too can cry, "Oh, glorious. Glorious!"; we too can give and share.¹⁶ Scrooge assures us that we can advance from the prison of self to the paradise of community. The Carol's fairy-tale structure helps in that assurance. The structure evokes and objectifies the undefiled world of childhood and makes us feel that we, like Scrooge, can recapture it. Deep symbolic identifications such as these, identifications that stir us whether we are consciously aware of them or not, give A Christmas Carol its enduring grip on our culture. A Christmas Carol is a myth or fairy tale for our times, one that is still full of life and relevance. Its yearly resurrection in advertisement, cartoon, and television program, its reappearance in new versions (in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, to cite only one instance), testify to this.

Yet the vitality of A Christmas Carol raises other questions. Why is the Carol, which elaborates the central idea found in the Gabriel Grub story in Pickwick, so much better than its prototype? "Gabriel Grub" does not elicit the empathy of the Carol. This is so because Gabriel never ascends to universality; he is simply a mean man who is taught an idiosyncratic lesson. We see nothing of his childhood, of his development, of his future; we see nothing, in other words, of the shaping forces that would allow us to relate to his experiences. The story centers on his drunken vision; it scants his salvation and our enlightenment. Furthermore, "Gabriel Grub" lacks any rich social import. Unlike the Carol, there is virtually no interwining of plot with social criticism: no ideas about ignorance and want, no anatomy of materialism, no criticism of relations between employer and employee, no effective demonstration of how to live. Misanthropy is simply presented and then punished. I am not suggesting that a work of art must have a social message. I am simply affirming that part of the Carol's appeal comes from its powerful demonstration of how a man should live—live in society—if he is to save his soul, a kind of demonstration that is largely lacking in "Gabriel Grub."

By the same token, the supernatural machinery of "Gabriel Grub," despite successful local effects, is mechanical and abrupt. Unlike the Carol, where Marley's ghost is the culmination of many signs and actions, in "Gabriel Grub" the King of the Goblins appears with little preparation; again, unlike the Carol, where Marley's ghost is a prototype of Scrooge, and therefore deeply significant, in "Gabriel Grub" the King of the Goblins is simply an agency, a convenient manipulative device, a creature who has no relevance to Gabriel's life and habits (other, perhaps, than being an emanation of Gabriel's habitual drunkenness). Even the Carol equivalents to the King of the Goblins, the three spirits, have an allegorical pertinence that the King of the Goblins lacks. In part these differences in the two stories are owing to differences in length, but more importantly they are owing to differences in conception and execution. Obviously the preeminence of the Carol, its elevation to culture fable, comes not from the basic ingredients—they can be found in "Gabriel Grub"—but from the perfect blending of well-wrought theme and well-wrought form. A Christmas Carol demonstrates how much more skilled Dickens had become in using fairy-tale conceptions to achieve that virtuoso blending, how adept he had become in using fairy-tale elements to integrate and convey his view of life.

A Christmas Carol is the best of the Christmas books, but it is not superior to the other Christmas books in all respects, and it is not always the most technically advanced. The second Christmas book, The Chimes, uses a more realistic, yet at the same time more imaginative, supernatural agency to guide the fairy-tale workings of the story—no convenient Carol ghosts here. In The Chimes the vibrations of the bells slowly take on magical qualities and superintend what takes place. The transformation of the bells into allegorical forces is done most elegantly. Dickens combines compelling exactitude and wonderful fancifulness. As in Chuzzlewit, the story opens with a personification of the wind, this time of a winter wind moaning and wailing through a London church at night. The wind sighs through aisle, vault, and altar, and it howls dismally in the steeple belfry where dwell the chimes that are the subject of the story. The personification of the wind is masterfully done—its airy presence is elaborately evocative and eerily powerful—but each figure and trope is rooted in a most meticulous realism.

The wind buffets and engulfs the church, and near the entrance to the church, in good weather and in foul, a poverty-stricken old ticket porter, Toby (or "Trotty") Veck, takes his stand. All day long he hears the bells chime, and all night too, for he lives hard by with his daughter, Meg. From his stand at the base of the tower, he often looks up at the bells as they chime, wonders how they are lodged, how cared for, and how rung. Trotty and the bells are much alike—the narrator draws a long analogy identifying the two.¹⁷ Indeed over the years Trotty has grown to love the bells and to commune with them. He invests them with special powers; they are his friends, sometimes they talk to him.¹⁸ Often the chimes seem to echo his thoughts, repeating and repeating some hope or fear in concise and cadenced measure.¹⁹ All this is developed slowly and carefully so that realism, psychology, and fancifulness blend and reinforce one another. As Dickens creates this aura, he also unfolds the story. The story takes place on the last day of the year. Trotty, at his chill post at the entrance to the church, is visited by his daughter, Meg, and her fiancé, Richard. Owing to their poverty, Meg and Richard have postponed their marriage for three years, but life is slipping past them, and now they want to marry on New Year's Day. As the old ticket porter and the young couple stand near the church door talking, they are confronted by three gentlemen who hold three commonplace attitudes toward the poor. Alderman Cute believes in putting the poor down; a red-faced gentleman recommends forcing them back to the "good old times"; and Mr. Filer treats them as lifeless columns of charts, averages, and statistics. Later in the afternoon Trotty meets a fourth gentleman, Sir Joseph Bowley, "The Poor Man's Friend and Father." This gentleman advocates a fourth attitude toward the poor. He requires that the poor be subservient and behave like dutiful children. The statements and actions of these four gentlemen, the newspaper reports Trotty has read concerning the crimes and atrocities of the poor, and his own grinding poverty cause him to feel that the poor are born bad, that they have no useful role to play in society, that they should not marry and multiply, and that they are better off dead.

That night at home, while Trotty is reading additional newspaper accounts of the depravities of the poor, the chimes ring out. They have been talking to Trotty all the day. Now they seem to call him, and they seem to echo his despair. The bells clang and clamor. They seem to say, "Haunt and hunt him, haunt and hunt him, Drag him to us, drag him to us!"²⁰ The bells clash and peal, louder and louder. Trotty feels pulled toward them. Partly as a result of that pull, partly because they seem so unusually loud, Trotty decides to see whether the bell-tower door is open. When he comes to the church he is astonished to find that the tower door is indeed open. He goes in to investigate and accidentally shuts the door, locking himself in. He begins to climb the tower, going round and round, up and up, encountering mysterious objects, hearing mysterious echoes. He finally feels a freshening and then a wind as he gropes toward the belfry. Now he is in the belfry. He can see the housetops and chimneys below him; he can see the tangled quarters in which he lives; he can see the dim lights in the distance, obscured and blurred by dark mists. He accidentally touches a bell rope, and then, as though "working out the spell upon him," he feels impelled to ascend the steep ladders toward the bells.²¹ Finally, he reaches them. He can just faintly make out "their great shapes in the gloom . . . Shadowy, and dark, and dumb."²² A heavy sense of loneliness and dread falls upon him as he climbs into this "airy nest of stone and metal."²³ His head spins. He calls out, "Halloa," hears the sound mournfully protracted by the echoes, and giddy and confused, sinks into a swoon.²⁴ At this point the second quarter of The Chimes ends.

It is only with the beginning of the third quarter—more than half way through the book—that the supernatural machinery of The Chimes takes over, a culmination that has been carefully prepared for by the slow accumulation of enchantment and by the events of the day. Trotty's swooning consciousness is now filled with dwarf creatures—phantoms, spirits, and elves—and with the jumbled thoughts and events of the last few hours. The tiny creatures cluster about him and also swarm through the surrounding city, attending all the actions and thoughts of the teeming multitudes who live nearby. Some of the phantoms are ugly, some handsome; some large, some small; some old, some young; some beat those they attend, some comfort them with music. They swarm about all the activities of life and death, filling the air and the habitations of men with restless and untiring motion. One becomes aware after a while that these tiny forms are creatures of the bells, and that they swarm through air and earth whenever the bells begin to chime. Trotty's "charmed footsteps" brought him to the belfry, but the airy elves proclaim their own identity. There is no mistaking that identity. Dickens personifies and allegorizes the vibrating bells with wonderful skill:

As he gazed, the Chimes stopped. Instantaneous change! The whole swarm [of tiny creatures] fainted! their forms collapsed, their speed deserted them; they sought to fly, but in the act of falling died and melted into air. No fresh supply succeeded them. One straggler leaped down pretty briskly from the surface of the Great Bell, and alighted on his feet, but he was dead and gone before he could turn round. Some few of the late company who had gambolled in the tower, remained there, spinning over and over a little longer; but these became at every turn more faint, and few, and feeble, and soon went the way of the rest. The last of all was one small hunchback, who had got into an echoing corner, where he twirled and twirled, and floated by himself a long time; showing such perseverance, that at last he dwindled to a leg and even to a foot, before he finally retired; but he vanished in the end, and then the tower was silent.²⁵

At this point Trotty dimly perceives in each bell a bearded figure of the bulk and stature of the bell, at once "a figure and the Bell itself."²⁶ Dickens develops these bell figures with rich and evocative symbolism. Mysterious and awful, they rest on nothing, their draped and hooded heads merged in the dim roof, their muffled hands upon their goblin mouths. They are hemmed about "in a very forest of hewn timber; from the entanglements, intricacies, and depths of which, as from among the boughs of a dead wood blighted for their phantom use, they kept their darksome and unwinking watch."²⁷ These figures are the goblins of the bells—the subtitle of The Chimes is A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In.Once the bell goblins are delineated, the masque begins. As great blasts of air come moaning through the tower and then die away, the Great Bell, its voice low and deep, but sounding with the other bells as well, begins to speak.

Trotty has come to the nest of time; the voice of the bells is the voice of time. Time now takes Trotty and shows him what the future holds in store if the pernicious doctrines he has heard that day are allowed to generate their deadly spawn. As in A Christmas Carol, Trotty's enlightenment is effected by being swiftly conveyed through space and time and shown vignettes that embody these lessons—vignettes that depict the harrowing destruction of Meg, Richard, and the suffering hosts of the poor, vignettes that shadow forth the final fiery death of the society that mandates such wanton perishings.

The development of The Chimes up to the vignettes is spare and masterful. The conception of time as the didactic agency and its embodiment in the bells is much more functional and imaginative than the three spirits of A Christmas Carol and is much better integrated into the realistic texture of the story. But the vignettes themselves are often feverish and overdrawn, sometimes mawkish, sometimes touched with inflated rhetoric. As a consequence, the latter portions of The Chimes often dwindle into tractlike preaching and excess. This tendency is not surprising. Dickens regarded the Christmas books as vehicles for social teaching. He felt that at the Christmas season men's hearts were softened and receptive. At that time, by invoking the spirit of Christmas and utilizing the magic of fairy stories, by bringing his readers through such means closer to their childhood innocence and openness, he could steal into their hearts and move them to change. In The Chimes he hoped to strike "a great blow for the poor"—an end he had had in mind for several years.²⁸ This desire to strike heavily and decisively caused him to overdraw the last two quarters of the story. He literally abandoned himself to the writing. He was seized each day by "regular, ferocious excitement," and he blazed away "wrathful and red-hot" until deep in the afternoon.²⁹ The story, he confessed, "has great possession of me every moment in the day; and drags me where it will." It often dragged him too far.³⁰The Chimes, despite many sections of memorable writing, lacks the mythlike universality of A Christmas Carol. It is too caught up in local wrongs and local satire to speak out engrossingly to later generations. It is a tract for the times, not a fable for posterity.

In his next Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home, Dickens is neither so urgent nor so insistent, but the work sinks under other difficulties. The Cricket is compounded of hackneyed plot contrivances and sentimental tableaus: mysterious strangers, miserly old lechers, heart-of-oak laborers, coyly fluttering heroines, mistaken conclusions, transparent disguises, and unbelievable transformations. The story is a celebration of home—a fairy tale of home, as the subtitle has it—a celebration of trust, forbearing love, and simple domestic joys. For the most part these virtues (and the actions that convey them) are mechanically asserted and superficially manipulated; one rarely gets the feeling that Dickens' deepest energies are involved. It is not that he disbelieves in the virtues he is espousing, it is that the demonstration fails to fire his imagination. Yet there are exceptions to this generalization. The dog, Boxer, the toys created by Caleb Plummer, the antics of Tilly Slowboy—these and other touches flare into intermittent life.

There is also a more important imaginative conception that lives—and lives more steadily. This is the fairytale accompaniment, the magical song of the cricket. Yet this accompaniment exists primarily outside the main narrative. The magical chord sounds powerfully at the opening, reverberates strongly again when John Peerybingle sits through the night and contemplates murder, and then echoes briefly at the end. There are storybook elements elsewhere in the novelette, of course. I have already mentioned some of the folklore motifs and folklore characters that work lifelessly at the center of the story. There are occasional fairy-tale allusions and stylistic touches as well. Here, for example, is how the second section begins: "Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, as the Story-books say—and my blessing, with yours to back it I hope, on the Story-books, for saying anything in this workaday world!—Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves, in a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house."³¹ This entrée forms a fitting opening for the strange storybook world the toymaker and his daughter live in and for the enchanted web of illusions the toymaker has spun round his blind child.

But the primary fairy-tale energy of the story is with the cricket, and to a lesser extent, with the kettle. These two commonplace adjuncts of hearth and home open the story; their music slowly fills the cottage fireside of John Peerybingle. In a long, intricate tour de force, Dickens brilliantly animates the humble kettle and lowly cricket, until their hum and chirp embody all the attributes of a happy home. That two-voiced sound, reassuring and irresistible, transformed into the essence of home, finally beams out into the world. Eventually "the kettle and the Cricket, at one and the same moment, and by some power of amalgamation best known to themselves, sent, each, his fireside song of comfort streaming into a ray of the candle that shone out through the window, and a long way down the lane. And this light, bursting on a certain person who, on the instant, approached towards it through the gloom, expressed the whole thing to him, literally in a twinkling, and cried, 'Welcome home, old fellow! Welcome home, my boy!'"³² The cricket soon becomes the very embodiment of the Peerybingle household, a spirit whose chirp can incorporate and summon up all the succoring powers vested in that loving home. The cricket on the hearth of John Peerybingle's house—the narrator soon tells us this outright—is the "Genius of his Hearth and Home."³³ As the cricket chirps upon the hearth, its familiar song evokes memories, reveries, and dreams in those who hear its music. Transformed by such associations, the comforting song of the cricket gradually assumes a fairy shape, enters the room in that form as well, and mingles its beneficent powers with the thoughts and yearnings of those who dwell within its circling sound. By such means (only suggested here in barest outline) Dickens translates the chirping cricket into a supernatural power while yet retaining its ordinary reality.

The cricket is much less of an active agent than the three spirits of A Christmas Carol or the bells of The Chimes. The cricket never plucks John Peerybingle out of his home and transports him bodily through space and time. The chirp of the cricket (and the spirit that chirp represents) quiets, softens, and comforts. The fairy cricket that helps John Peerybingle survive his night of anguish and fury, and the saving visions that come to him under the influence of the cricket, are less the intrusions of a supernatural force than the symbolic representation (incarnated in the cricket and its spirit) of the saving power of memory and love—this power objectified in the specific scenes and actions that John Peerybingle remembers or projects as he muses under the influence of the cricket, that is, under the influence of hearth and home. In other words, the cricket (hearth and home) helps John Peerybingle save himself. On the one hand the cricket plays much less of an interventionary role than its earlier counterparts, on the other hand its role is more domesticated and psychological.

Dickens seems to have been discontented with the overt fairy-tale machinery of his Christmas books. The intrusive ghosts and spirits of the Carol had given way to the carefully generated bell goblins of The Chimes, which in turn had yielded to the more domesticated (and limited) crickets and kettles of The Cricket on the Hearth. In the next Christmas book, The Battle of Life, he dispensed with supernatural machinery altogether. The Battle is not only the least typical of the Christmas books but the least successful. Dickens came close to abandoning the work, and he was several times on the verge of breakdown. In part this was owing to overwork, to concurrently beginning a twenty-part novel, but more basically it was owing to the intractability of the material.

In many respects the donnée of The Battle deserved development in a full-length novel. The Battle of Life focuses on an attractive wastrel, Michael Warden, who is in love with an angelic woman, Marion Jeddler, a woman he is debarred from marrying. This theme of an appealing but unworthy man longing for a seraphic woman he cannot or should not have (Dickens returned to the theme in A Tale of Two Cities), requires, if it is to have any depth at all, careful development and analysis—a kind of anatomy all but ruled out in a brief Christmas book, especially a Christmas book shorn of its supernatural machinery. Without the storybook machinery to manipulate and foreshorten the theme, satisfactory elaboration was impossible. Dickens soon came to see this. "I have written nearly a third of [The Battle of Life]" he said. "It promises to be pretty; quite a new idea in the story, I hope; but to manage it without the supernatural agency now impossible of introduction, and yet to move it naturally within the required space, or with any shorter limit than a Vicar of Wakefield, I find to be a difficulty so perplexing . . . that I am fearful of wearing myself out if I go on."³⁴ Dickens, of course, did go on. The result is a savagely reduced work that sometimes reads like a scenario, sometimes like a breathless outline, and that lacks compelling life.

With The Haunted Man, the last of the Christmas books, Dickens turned back to his storybook format. In some respects he also turned back to the Carol. Like Scrooge, the protagonist of The Haunted Man must learn to live with his past if he is also to live in the present and the future. But the two works show marked differences in emphasis and technique. In The Haunted Man Dickens set out, in a much more self-conscious way than in the Carol, to unite psychological, social, and allegorical truth in a single realistic fairy-tale conception.

The Haunted Man tells the story of Mr. Redlaw, a learned and benevolent professor of chemistry who is appalled by the misery he sees about him. His own life has been filled with death, betrayal, and unfulfilled love, and he longs to blot out these memories that darken his daily existence. But his mind is confused and divided. Although he yearns to escape from painful memories, he broods over the past. One Christmas Eve as he sits before his fire haunted by sad recollections, that part of his mind which desires to suppress memory takes on corporeal being as a phantom mirror image of himself. The phantom presses its arguments powerfully and wins Redlaw to its point of view. Redlaw will forget, he will have surcease from feeling, but he will retain his learning and acuteness. But the gift, as so often in fairy stories, contains an additional feature: his forgetfulness will be transmitted to those he meets. Redlaw soon discovers that his gift is a curse. For in forgetting past sorrow and feeling, he has, like Scrooge, destroyed all that is softening and human in life. Despite his learning and benevolence, he has failed to grasp a simple, oft-repeated Romantic axiom (celebrated in such different works as Keats' "Ode on Melancholy" and Emerson's "Compensation") which states that suffering and joy, decay and beauty, loss and achievement are so intertwined that banishing one banishes the other. The unhappy multitudes whose misery he had hoped to relieve by his gift are not relieved. As he goes among them he produces discord; he destroys the knot of affection and forbearance that is the saving grace of their hard lives. Only two creatures take no infection from his approach. One, a street waif, remains unchanged because his bestial life has known no human feeling and so can know no loss. The other, Milly, the wife of one of Redlaw's servants, is love and goodness incarnate, and thus proof against his curse. His experiences teach him his error, and with the help of Milly, he redeems himself and removes the blight from those he has cursed.

The debt of The Haunted Man to fairy tales is pervasive. The full title of the story is The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas-Time. This spectral title is reinforced by the pictorial frontispiece and the pictorial title page that stand opposite one another and introduce the volume. The frontispiece (all illustrations were suggested and approved by Dickens) features Redlaw's ghostly alter ego whispering in his ear while devils, demons, and goblins contend with radiant angels. The title page depicts a bright angel and a dark, hooded phantom leading a child in different directions. These supernatural and allegorical associations are echoed in the title of the first chapter, "The Gift Bestowed." This title awakens additional fairy-tale associations, associations underlined by the other two chapter headings: "The Gift Diffused" and "The Gift Reversed." These storybook suggestions are further reinforced by the woodcut illustration that appears on the first page and that depicts, wreathed above giant shadows and looming forms, scenes from The Arabian Nights, The Tales of the Genii, and Cinderella. These graphic allusions mirror the text, for fairy tales and childhood storybooks, and in particular some of Dickens' favorite childhood storybooks, play a role in The Haunted Man. The Arabian Nights, The Tales of the Genii, Jack the Giant Killer, Dr. Watts' Divine Songs, and The Children in the Wood are all worked into the story. The Children in the Wood, as a matter of fact, is one of the tales that helps comfort and sustain the Tetterbys. It is also an index of their moral state. Like Scrooge, who is cold and flinty when he has forgotten such old companions as The Arabian Nights, Valentine and Orson, and Robinson Crusoe, and who is softened when he is made to remember them, the Tetterbys are harsh and hostile when they cannot respond to The Children in the Wood, loving and forbearing when they can.³⁵

Many other allusions, graphic and literary, and many additional touches contribute to the magical atmosphere of The Haunted Man, but these features, important as they are, only serve to reinforce the more central fairytale resonances of the story, the witching chords of character and setting. Redlaw's home is a good example. It is an enchanted castle, a group of moldering medieval college buildings standing in the midst of the bustling city and wrapped in a gloomy atmosphere of murky shadows and muffled shapes. His home reminds one of a witch's castle. It was always "thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut,—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air."³⁶ With descriptions such as this, and with scores of evocative suggestions and directive touches through all the early pages, Dickens intensifies his ghostly mood, until he creates an atmosphere in which the supernatural and the realistic mingle and then combine. Here, a few lines later, is Redlaw as he sits before the fire at the moment his Christmas Eve adventures begin:

You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the dead winter time.

When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going down of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that the forms of things were indistinct and big—but not wholly lost. When sitters by the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades, and armies, in the coals.³⁷

In this thickening twilight strange things happen. Shadows close in and gather like "mustering swarms of ghosts."³⁸ Then nurses turn into ogresses, rocking horses into monsters, hearth-tongs into straddling giants, and children, "half-scared and half-amused," into strangers to themselves.³⁹ The images and the associations these suggestions arouse are wonderfully appropriate, for they are compounded out of childhood fears and childhood fantasies—one thinks of Dickens listening to Mary Weiler—but leavened now by adult insight and knowledge.

Redlaw partakes of this ambiance. He is another metamorphosis of a figure familiar in Dickens, the misanthropic witchlike sorcerer. Redlaw's witchlike appearance, his "hollow cheek . . . sunken brilliant eye . . . black attired figure . . . grizzled hair hanging, like tangled seaweed, about his face"; his witchlike traffic with phantoms and the secrets of nature (for he is a most learned chemist); and his witchlike ability to cast potent spells (he transmits as well as receives the gift)—all these mark him as the evil enchanter of fairy lore.⁴⁰ Yet like many of Dickens' witches and warlocks, like old Martin and Scrooge, for example, he is not entirely evil, he is a good human being in disguise or gone astray, he can be redeemed. And Milly, like her prototype, little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, is the fairy princess, an embodiment of perfect goodness who will magically effect Redlaw's salvation. In The Haunted Man the Quilplike character who is evil incarnate (to continue the parallel with The Old Curiosity Shop) has undergone the greatest change. The beastlike incarnation of evil is now combined with the abandoned waif and becomes the beast-waif. Both the waif and the beast-waif are portentous characters whose origins go back to Dickens' own childhood, to his blacking-warehouse abandonment and street lounging, and both characters appear in his writings in countless permutations. In A Christmas Carol the chief embodiment of the waif, Tiny Tim, had appeared primarily in the image of Oliver, Smike, and little Nell, that is, as an innocent child condemned to unjust suffering. The more sinister personification of evil, the beast-waif, had emerged only in passing. This more malignant figure had been doubled in A Christmas Carol, but had entered the story only momentarily as the allegorical children Ignorance and Want, two demonstrations dragged into the fable as exhibits rather than actors. In The Haunted Man the very real beast-waif—"a baby savage, a young monster, a child who . . . would live and perish a mere beast"—has an active role in the story and becomes a central symbol not merely of nascent evil, but of society's guilt in producing evil.⁴¹ Continuing the process begun in the other Christmas books, Dickens' recurrent fairy-tale figures—the excrescential or allegorical beast-waifs and ghosts, the more functional bell goblins and chirping crickets—are taking on an enlarged significance, and though retaining their fairy-tale origins, are becoming more closely linked with contemporary life, realistic psychology, and thematic motifs.

In The Haunted Man Dickens uses many additional devices commonly found in fairy stories. He uses portentous repetition, for instance, to enhance the tale's atmosphere of enchantment and to unify the work. The words of the phantom's gift-curse—"The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will"—are repeated throughout the story and intensify this unity and enchantment. Redlaw soon discovers that "blowing in the wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in the moonlight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the Phantom's words, 'The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!'"⁴² The repetition of the curse becomes, in storybook fashion, a magical refrain that gathers suspense until its climax and reversal when the curse-refrain is replaced by its opposite, a refrain that has been developed contrapuntally throughout the story: "Lord keep my memory green." But it is more than the fairy-tale curse, it is the imagery of Redlaw's loss associated with the curse—imagery connected with his new insensitivity to nature, time, and music—that is repeated. This repetition gradually swells into a leitmotif and sounds the knell of Redlaw's loss; the loss, in turn, through repetition and association, becomes incorporated into the curse. What Redlaw sees in nature, for example, in the blowing wind, the falling snow, the drifting clouds, the shining moonlight, is not an evocation of wildness and beauty, an experience full of associations that can quicken and comfort him, but mere physical fact. This is part of Redlaw's deprivation. He sees the curse in the blowing wind, the falling snow, and the other manifestations of nature, because the curse is an objectification of his inability to respond, an objectification of his longed-for inurement to feeling. Like Coleridge, Redlaw the analytical chemist can see, not feel, how beautiful the world is. Through such repetitions, linkings, and associations, Dickens gradually makes the curse embody Redlaw's grievous sin and loss.

There are other storybook elements in the curse. Each time the curse is transmitted, the recipient signifies his infection by a telltale action: "the wandering hand upon the forehead."⁴³ These and similar repetitions (which are frequently joined with one another) become increasingly magical and ritualistic, as in the following pattern of reiterations: "Three times, in their progress [Redlaw and the beast-waif] were side by side. Three times they stopped, being side by side. Three times the Chemist glanced down at [the beast-waif's] face, and shuddered as it forced upon him one reflection."⁴⁴ The dovetailing of such incantations and repetitions with their many analogues interconnects their meanings. For example, Dickens links the Redlaw—beast-waif walk and its three pauses (labeling them "first," "second," and "third") with images of memory, night, moonlight, and music—images he had been reiterating throughout the story by means of the poetic leitmotif associated with Redlaw's curse.⁴⁵ The leitmotif is coordinate with the curse, but it is more lyrical, connotative, and musical. It is another form of repetition and incantation—a linguistic extension of Dickens' fairytale recurrences—and it offers Dickens another means of sounding the keynote. Once this leitmotif and its many associations are established, Dickens is able, by means of the leitmotif (as well as by means of the curse), to call up Redlaw's loss with great economy and centripetal effect.

Paralleling and intermingling with the fairy-tale level of The Haunted Man is an allegorical level that underlines Dickens' message. Dickens was perfectly aware of the allegorical nature of what he had written. In the penultimate paragraph of The Haunted Man he has the narrator point to the possibility of such an interpretation: "Some people have said since, that [Redlaw] only thought what has been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one winter night about the twilight time; others, that the Ghost was but the representation of his own gloomy thoughts, and Milly the embodiment of his better wisdom. I say nothing." Dickens, through the narrator, was suggesting various modes of interpreting his story but very properly endorsing no single mode. Yet any reader who failed to make use of each of his suggestions would miss part of what he was saying.

The allegory of The Haunted Man is designed to enforce the message which the other levels develop—that good and evil are intertwined, that memories and feelings associate pain and joy, and that such associations can be dissolved only at the expense of that which makes one human. Redlaw, before he is given the gift, is man in his suffering but human condition; after the gift, he is man as a mere analytical chemist, man as an arid, dehumanized husk. The phantom is that portion of Redlaw's mind which longs for surcease from feeling and tempts him to an attitude toward himself and his fellows that will produce such surcease. The gift is the symbolic result of Redlaw's assent to these promptings of his mind; it is the effect on himself and others of acquiescing in such a philosophy. Milly stands for love, and the softening, saving influence of love. The beast-waif represents two things: first, human nature bereft of feeling and sympathy, that is, human nature completely dehumanized, human nature that displays the end result of Redlaw's foolish yearnings; and second, the evil and guilt of a society that produces creatures such as the beast-waif.

The allegory of character is intensified by the allegory of setting. The worn-out leftovers of Mr. Tetterby's defunct business are ever-present tokens of his ineffectual personality; the tortuous slum Redlaw visits mirrors the twisted lives he finds within. But the chief backdrop for the action—Redlaw's college chambers—is the most revealing of the settings. The fortress in which he lives is a fitting representation of his mind. And when his mind changes, sympathetic, almost magical transformations also occur in his frost-bound home. When he allows love to reenter his heart, his dungeon and heart reawaken alike: "Some blind groping of the morning made its way down into the forgotten crypt so cold and earthy . . . and stirred the dull deep sap in the lazy vegetation hanging to the walls, and quickened the slow principle of life within the little world of wonderful and delicate creation which existed there, with some faint knowledge that the sun was up."⁴⁶

The allegory becomes most intense toward the end of the second chapter. Redlaw visits the slums with the beast-waif. During that visit he goes through all the experiences necessary to teach him the significance of his error. Upon his return he locks himself and the beast-waif into his lonely rooms and broods despairingly. After an interval, Milly knocks on Redlaw's door. "Pray, sir, let me in!" she cries.⁴⁷ Symbolically love is knocking at the locked chambers of Redlaw's heart and asking to be let in. "No! not for the world!" is his ironic answer. The beast-waif, who has been fed and tended by Milly, cries out, "Let me go to her, will you?" (The evil that society has produced will respond to love, cries out for love.) Milly, not knowing Redlaw is the cause, tells him of the disasters his slum visit has brought. "Pray, sir, let me in," she repeats. Redlaw is horrified, contrite, anguished, but his heart is still frozen; he cannot really feel or remember, he is not yet ready to let love enter. "Pray, sir, let me in!" cries Milly, but Redlaw answers, "No! No! No!" and restrains the beast-waif "who was half-mad to pass him, and let her in." Redlaw prays to his phantom alter ego for relief, vows not to taint Milly with his curse, and, thus refusing to confront love, stands in an agony of guilt before the door he himself has locked. The phantom does not answer Redlaw's prayer. "The only reply still was, the boy struggling to get to her, while he held him back; and the cry, increasing in its energy . . . 'pray, pray, let me in!'"⁴⁸

With these words the second chapter ends. Dickens' method is effective and sophisticated. It reminds one of Hawthorne's technique, of those portions of The Scarlet Letter or "Rappaccini's Daughter" in which the central allegory shades into subtle and varied suggestiveness. But that suggestiveness has other components than those so far discussed. For when Redlaw calls out to his fairy-tale phantom and hears Milly's allegorical plea, he is also acting out a psychological drama that has parallels in Dickens' life.

The third concurrent level of Redlaw's story—the psychological (and in this case the autobiographical)—appears in The Haunted Man from the beginning. Dickens makes it easy for the reader to regard the phantom as the representation of Redlaw's "gloomy thoughts." The phantom materializes only after many directive signs, which can be explained as natural or supernatural, have heralded its appearance. These manifestations come in conjunction with Redlaw's internal debating and self-absorption. Consequently, when the signs coalesce and then develop into the full-fledged phantom, the reader is ready to accept the apparition as another part of the storybook atmosphere, and as an appropriate representation of one portion of Redlaw's mind. Once the latter notion is established, the story becomes, like the story of murder-bent Jonas Chuzzlewit's two selves, a study of psychological strife. But here the technique is different from that used in Chuzzlewit. In The Haunted Man the conflict is depicted by utilizing the method Tennyson used in "The Two Voices"; Redlaw's divided mind is engaged in a dialogue with itself:

"If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would," the Ghost repeated. . . .

"Evil spirit of myself," returned the haunted man . . . "my life is darkened by that incessant whisper."

"It is an echo," said the Phantom.

"If it be an echo of my thoughts . . . why should I, therefore, be tormented? . . . Who would not forget their sorrows and their wrongs?"

"Who would not, truly, and be the happier and better for it?" said the Phantom. . . .

"Tempter," answered Redlaw .. . "I hear again an echo of my own mind."⁴⁹

The Haunted Man was written under special stress. In the summer of 1848, while Dickens was planning to complete his long-postponed Christmas book, his sister Fanny lay dying wretchedly of consumption. Dickens visited her often during that summer. As he looked upon her gaunt body and grieved over her early decay, his mind kept turning to the days when he and she had been children together.⁵⁰ Fanny died on 2 September, and a month or so later Dickens sat down to finish The Haunted Man. The Haunted Man is a dirge to memory. It probes the deep dissatisfactions that had been stirred up and intensified by his sister's death. It also shadows forth an image of Dickens. Redlaw reminds us of Dickens. Like Redlaw, Dickens worked in his "inner chamber, part library and part laboratory"; like Redlaw, he was revered and famous; like Redlaw, he was a teacher upon whose words and works "a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily"; like Redlaw, he was surrounded by "a crowd of spectral shapes"; like Redlaw, he had the power "to uncombine" those phantoms and make them "give back their component parts"; like Redlaw, he would sit in his study "moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead."⁵¹

However, it is Redlaw's confrontation with his darker self that produces the most striking parallels. Through Redlaw and Redlaw's specter, Dickens summons up the shaping events of his own past:

"Look upon me!" said the Spectre. "I am he, neglected in my youth, and miserably poor, who strove and suffered, and still strove and suffered, until I hewed out knowledge from the mine where it was buried, and made rugged steps thereof, for my worn feet to rest and rise on."

"I am that man," returned the Chemist.

"No mother's self-denying love," pursued the Phantom, "no father's counsel, aided me. A stranger came into my father's place when I was but a child, and I was easily an alien from my mother's heart. My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done; who cast their offspring loose, early, as birds do theirs; and, if they do well, claim the merit; and, if ill, the pity."

"I had a sister" [the Phantom went on]. . . . "Such glimpses of the light of home as I had ever known, had streamed from her. How young she was, how fair, how loving! I took her to the first poor roof that I was master of, and made it rich. She came into the darkness of my life, and made it bright."⁵²

But this felicity does not last. Redlaw's most trusted friend betrays his sister and steals his fiancée. In the wake of this double catastrophe only one thing survives, or seems to survive—jilted sister cleaves to jilted brother.

"My sister" [continued the Phantom], "doubly dear, doubly devoted, doubly cheerful in my home, lived on to see me famous, and my old ambition so rewarded when its spring was broken, and then—"

"Then died," [Redlaw] interposed. "Died, gentle as ever, happy, and with no concern but for her brother."⁵³

Redlaw cannot forget. He constantly chants his litany of woe. His words toll the knell of his (and Dickens') complaint: "Early unhappiness, a wound from a hand I loved and trusted, and a loss that nothing can replace." These old grievances haunt and torment Redlaw. "Thus," he continues, "I prey upon myself. Thus, memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!"⁵⁴

Yet it is not the autobiography or the message that makes The Haunted Man notable, it is the fairy-tale technique, or rather the refinement and integration of a constellation of fairy-tale techniques. These techniques help Dickens manipulate and interweave the various strands of his story—the social, allegorical, psychological, and fanciful—and make them part of a harmonious pattern.

The Haunted Man has other distinctions. It surpasses the earlier Christmas books in its self-conscious use of repetition, recurrence, and leitmotif. It also surpasses those works in its sophisticated fusion of realism, psychology, and allegory. All these elements are used in The Haunted Man to enforce the theme, and all are used to interrelate and unify. In this centripetal movement the fairy story dominates. It serves as subject matter, catalyst, and vehicle. The fairy tale enables Dickens to achieve his special goal. For the mood Dickens sets at the opening, the supernatural devices he uses to unify his plot and emphasize his message, and the fablelike quality he gives to what he is saying prepare the reader for the apocalyptic truth he is trying to convey—a truth in which simple realism, ordinary events, and humdrum detail are less important than a heightened, extrareal vision of life that quickens one's perception of the very reality it transcends.

Yet The Haunted Man, despite technical advances, powerful scenes, and memorable characters, fails and fades, especially in "The Gift Reversed." Milly, for one thing, is too angelic and too inanely self-congratulatory (a sort of Esther Summerson at her worst), and she is used, in the last chapter, as a mere agency for removing the curse. Furthermore, the last chapter is so clogged and tangled with melodramatic coincidences that it becomes huddled and implausible. Dickens digs up lost relations, rewards suffering fiancées, and rehabilitates suicidal derelicts. The earlier fusion of realism, psychology, and fantasy is sacrificed for the convenience of a neat winding up in the old wrenching storybook manner, and the violence done to everything but the fable reduces the effectiveness of the fable itself.

The preeminence of A Christmas Carol when compared to its counterparts can lead one to believe that the subsequent Christmas books represent a falling off, an effort by Dickens to repeat the Carol formula with imperfect success. But this is to neglect what Dickens attempted in his Christmas books and what he learned from them. After the Carol Dickens tried to locate the overt fairy-tale machinery in the more ordinary surroundings and experiences of life, in chimes, crickets, kettles, and divided minds. He attempted to emphasize the reality of these agencies, and he sought to distill his supernatural effects from that carefully nurtured reality—from vibrations, chirpings, and brooding questionings. He also began to reduce the overt fairy-tale machinery, to subject less of the story to its immediate control. The supernatural machinery, though carefully prepared for, enters The Chimes only at the middle. The artful storybook presences of The Cricket, subdued now in their supernatural attributes, emerge tactfully at the beginning and tactfully at the middle. In these later works, Dickens apparently wanted to retain the unified impact and fablelike quality of the Carol but to do so with an ever more dominant realism, or rather with a realism that would retain its ordinary truthfulness to life while revealing life's magic and interconnectedness. With The Battle of Life, he dispensed with the supernatural machinery altogether, but saddled himself with a donnée so novelistic, so needful of expansion and development, that without the aid of magical manipulation, he barely managed to sketch the story's high points, much less develop its psychological intricacies or numinous resonances. In The Haunted Man he went back to the Carol formula, but with increased attention to an array of more subtle fantasy devices—devices more amenable to a realistic context than phantoms and goblins, though he used these as well—devices that could help him compress, combine, and enlarge.

Yet the need to depend on phantoms and magical machinery was irksome and confining. Dickens felt trapped in the Christmas-book form. In his general preface (1852) to the Christmas books, he wrote: "The narrow space within which it was necessary to confine these Christmas Stories when they were originally published, rendered their construction a matter of some difficulty, and almost necessitated what is peculiar in their machinery. I never attempted great elaboration of detail in the working out of character within such limits, believing that it could not succeed. My purpose was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land."⁵⁵ In this statement three ideas emerge clearly: Dickens felt that the narrow space of the Christmas books confined and limited him; and he believed that the fairy story could be used to solve problems of construction and to convey truth in a special way. One would assume that the sequel to such postulates would be that Dickens would turn back to the novel, and that within that larger space he would use the fairy tale, much more self-consciously and elaborately now, to help him with structure and coherence and to provide him with additional means of conveying meaning. This, in fact, is what happened.

I do not mean to imply by this that Dickens abandoned the fairy tale as fairy tale. He subsequently wrote a number of veritable fairy stories—allegories, satires, burlesques, fables, and supernatural stories that were couched in fairy-tale guise. But these pieces were scattered and intermittent; most of them were offshoots of his topical journalism. They do not have the centrality and the importance of the Christmas books. The Christmas books are at the heart of Dickens' writing and experimenting in the mid-1840s. His later redactions of fairy stories testify to his continued devotion to the genre, but his deepest and most potent storybook energies—the energies that were coeval with his power to transcend and transform, the energies that had been slowly nurtured and crucially shaped by a thousand childhood forces, by the nightmare of the blacking warehouse, by the frustrations and achievements of the apprentice novels, and now by the equivocal lessons of the Christmas books—those energies were flowing elsewhere. They were flowing, of course, into his novels.

What the Christmas books added to Dickens' fairytale art and what they contributed to the later novels can be quickly sketched. The Christmas books helped Dickens overcome old difficulties, and they encouraged him to introduce new techniques. Through his Christmas-book experimentation—though not exclusively by such means—Dickens learned how to make mood and atmosphere permeate every nuance of a story. He also evolved ways of making leitmotif, repetition, recurrence, and symbolism develop and integrate structure. In addition, the Christmas books helped him intensify and enrich his psychological analysis. The peculiar demands of the Christmas books encouraged him to convey states of mind through magically sympathetic objects and surroundings, to objectify internal divisions through doubles and alter egos, to depict psychological struggles through allegory and symbolism. Some of these techniques confirmed or amplified what Dickens had done earlier, others pushed him in new directions. In a similar way, his Christmas fairy tales showed him how to give the central realism of his story a consistent and thematic pattern of fancy and symbolism. What had heretofore been intermittent now became much more self-conscious, ordered, and regular. The Christmas novelettes also provided him with his first experience of completing a sizable fictional whole as a whole. They allowed him, five times over, to think and plan and write with an entirety in mind rather than a part. Dickens immediately recognized the importance of that overview. "When I see the effect of such a little whole as that," he wrote after finishing the Carol, "I have a strong sense of the immense effect I could produce with an entire book."⁵⁶

In short, through the Christmas books and their fairytale potentialities, Dickens came to see more clearly how he could use fantasy to enhance character, scene, atmosphere, action, and meaning, and beyond that how he could use enchantment to bind the diverse elements of a fiction into a whole. One thing more. The Christmas books helped Dickens fuse the two dominant modes of his imagination. They helped him meld realism and fancy into rich thematic fullness. Through that new fullness, at once compellingly real and wildly fanciful, he could better convey the complexity and wonder of life.

One can see the experiments and lessons of the Christmas books reverberating in the subsequent novels. The bells and vibrations and clamor that pursue the despairing Trotty in The Chimes look forward to the bells and wheels and horses' feet that haunt the fleeing Carker in Dombey. The thematic weather that guides and unifies the Carol develops into the even more thematic weather that shapes and integrates Bleak House. The rudimentary analysis of Scrooge's childhood, its formative pressure on his adulthood, in A Christmas Carol turns into the more careful examination of Clennam's childhood and its consequences in Little Dorrit. The leitmotifs, repetitions, and incantations of The Haunted Man anticipate the analogous repetitions and recurrences of A Tale of Two Cities. The unity of mood, atmosphere, and theme that marks the Carol foreshadows the richer unity of tone and ambiance that pervades Great Expectations. The dark double that objectifies Redlaw's alienation and self-division in The Haunted Man evolves into the two separate selves that epitomize the alienation and self-division of such different characters as Wemmick in Great Expectations and Jasper in Edwin Drood. In each instance—the instances could easily be multiplied—it is not simply the idea that is similar but the technique of conveying it; and in each instance the technique is rooted in Dickens' Christmas-book experimentation.

I am not suggesting that Dickens went to the Christmas books, deliberately extracted these storybook devices, and then applied them to his later novels as tested ways of solving certain literary problems. I am not even suggesting that he always identified these devices with his Christmas books or with fairy stories. Nor do I doubt that many additional factors—the theater, the works of other authors, the spirit of the age, to name only three—made their contributions to these special developments. I am simply emphasizing that the Christmas books played a pivotal role in these developments. First, they forced Dickens, over a period of years, to concentrate on fairy-tale modes, a concentration that was congenial to his lifelong imaginative bent. Second, they helped him, during a crucial pause in his novel writing, to solve difficult problems of construction, integration, and transcendence. When he came to face those same problems in his subsequent novels, it was only natural that he should utilize (whether consciously or not) the methods and devices that had served him well in the Christmas books.

Yet the Christmas books themselves were unsatisfactory. They were limiting and confining. They made elaborate analysis and intricate development virtually impossible. They were dependent upon machinery that did violence to reality. Dickens was not content to convey his vision of life through phantoms and goblins. He did not wish to confine his art to ghostly allegories and whimsical masques. He wanted to present life in its density, its solid reality, but at the same time convey its shimmering strangeness and wonder.

It is not surprising, therefore, that even as the idea for his last Christmas book worked slowly through his mind, he was embarking upon a new novel, Dombey and Son, a novel that would display a virtuoso fusion of reality and fantasy. Dombey was a departure. Unlike the earlier novels, it was rooted in the present. Pickwick, Nickleby, Barnaby, and all the other apprentice novels had been set in the historical past, or had been hazily located in the ambiguous purlieus of a largely vanished age. Dombey was of the moment; it was a book about "the way we live now." It dealt with businessmen and railroads, capital and labor, the concerns and problems of the day. Yet this new book, with its new subject matter, and its up-to-date milieu, was to have the old indebtedness to fairy stories—old now in the sense of continuity, not of method. Fairy tales would appear in Dombey in the old ways, but they would also appear in new configurations: as elaborations and refinements of Christmas-book techniques. These techniques would help give Dombey a richness and unity that his earlier novels had lacked. Dombey would be minutely realistic, deeply social, profoundly psychological—all in ways that went beyond what Dickens had done before; but it would also vibrate intensely with fantasy and wonder—also in ways that went beyond what he had done before. Dombey, like the Christmas books, would be a fairy tale for the times, but a fairy tale given a surpassingly "higher form."

C The Chimes

CB Christmas Books

CC A Christmas Carol

CH The Cricket on the Hearth

CS Christmas Stories

F Forster's Life

HM The Haunted Man

NL Nonesuch Letters

¹ The dates given here refer to actual publication; the second and third books, though issued in December 1844 and December 1845 respectively, were dated the following year.

² F, 422-423, 466-467.

³ F, 317.

⁴CC, 3.

⁵CC, i, 6.

⁶CC, i, 7.

⁷CC, i, 7.

⁸CC, i, 14.

⁹CC, i, 14.

¹⁰CC, i, 15.

¹¹CC, i, 17-19.

¹²CC, i, 20.

¹³CC, ii, 30.

¹⁴CC, ii, 30-31.

¹⁵CC, ii, 32.

¹⁶CC, v, 83.

¹⁷C, i, 99.

¹⁸C, i, 99-100.

¹⁹C, i, 118.

²⁰C, ii, 139.

²¹C, ii, 141.

²²C, ii, 141.

²³C, ii, 141.

²⁴C, ii, 141.

²⁵C, iii, 144.

²⁶C, iii, 144.

²⁷C, iii, 145.

²⁸NL, I, 627.

²⁹NL. I, 631.

³⁰NL, I, 630.

³¹CH, ii, 220.

³²CH, i 196.

³³CH, i, 218.

³⁴ F, 426.

³⁵HM, iii, 469.

³⁶HM, i, 389.

³⁷HM, i, 389.

³⁸HM, i, 391.

³⁹HM, i, 391.

⁴⁰HM, i, 387-388.

⁴¹HM, i, 412.

⁴²HM, ii, 442.

⁴³HM, ii, 454.

⁴⁴HM, ii, 446.

⁴⁵HM, ii, 446-447.

⁴⁶HM, iii, 465.

⁴⁷HM, ii, 458.

⁴⁸HM, ii, 458-459.

⁴⁹HM, i, 409.

⁵⁰ F, 521.

⁵¹HM, i, 388.

⁵²HM, i, 406-407.

⁵³HM, i, 408.

⁵⁴HM, i, 408.

⁵⁵CB, xi. In the Preface (1868) to the Charles Dickens Edition of the Christmas books, Dickens amended the second sentence as follows: "I could not attempt great elaboration of detail, in the working out of character within such limits." In the next sentence he changed "My purpose" to "My chief purpose"—xi.

⁵⁶NL, I, 549.